Lance Van Sittert
Biographic Data
| ID | 1144648 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lance Van Sittert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lance |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Sittert |
| SIGNATURE | VAN SITTERT L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 107 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Begging Letters: Tin Trunk Literacy and the Empathy Economy of Tristan da Cunha, c . 1909–39
European colonialism fostered ‘radically constrained’ literacies in the global south dominated by the epistolary form produced by ‘tin trunk literati’ frequently scribing as amanuenses for collectives. Literacy on the British mid-South Atlantic island colony of Tristan da Cunha was marginal to the nineteenth century male exchange economy and consequently relegated to the female domestic sphere. With the shift from sail to steam in trans-oceanic s…
Routinising genocide: The politics and practice of vermin extermination in the Cape Province c.1889–1994
Adhikari has recently argued that genocide was a practice particular to colonial frontiers where commercial stock farmers encountered indigenous hunter-gatherers. This paper supports and extends Adhikari’s analysis by broadening its anthropocentric focus to include other species. It shows that the key technologies of genocide employed in the extermination of San hunter-gatherers were subsequently incorporated into everyday Cape stock farming prac…
Working Children: Rural Child Labor Markets in the Postemancipation Great Karoo, South Africa, 1856–1913
There is a lacuna in the scholarship on child labor in Africa in general and the Cape Colony in particular between the abolition of slavery in the 1830s and the start of state regulation of childhood around the turn of the twentieth century. This is not for want of sources. Historians of the Cape colony have traditionally mined the criminal records to divine relations of production in the postemancipation countryside, which they have unsurprising…
Children for Ewes: Child Indenture in the Post-Emancipation Great Karoo: c. 1856-1909
While the employment of child labour in the Cape Colony under slavery is well known, the same cannot be said for the post-emancipation period, despite the hinge masters and servants ordinance of 1841 governing the new free labour market legitimating employment of two categories of child labour: those indentured by their parents, and ‘destitute children’ indentured by the state. Both groups left paper trails. That of destitute children is easier t…
The Golden Fleece of the Cape: Capitalist Expansion and Labour Relations in the Periphery of Transnational Wool Production, c.1860–1950
The Golden Fleece of the Cape: Capitalist Expansion and Labour Relations in the Periphery of Transnational Wool Production, c.1860–1950." Journal of Southern African Studies, 41(5), pp. 1140–1141
Political Corruption’ and the Moral Economy of Apartheid: The Case of Dawie Walters, the ‘Lobster King of South Africa’
Historians of apartheid ‘political corruption’ have employed universal definitions which generate normative judgements rather than historical understanding of changing practices and derive measures of corruption from the macro topography of state and society not their actual micro practices. An alternative historical approach recognises political corruption as contingent and requiring situated micro readings to reveal the shifting moral economy o…
Ironman’: Joseph Daniels and the white history of South Africa's deep south
Polar history has historically been white history, nowhere more so than in South Africa, The recent attempt to imagine a post-apartheid deep south through the public recovery of a black boatman who drowned in the annexation of the Prince Edward Islands in 1948 has ironically left the white history largely intact. Re-reading the annexation not as ceremony and survey, but as labour calls the central claims of this white history into question; that …
Fighting Spells: The Politics of Hysteria and the Hysteria of Politics on Tristan da Cunha, 1937–1938
Journal Article Fighting Spells: The Politics of Hysteria and the Hysteria of Politics on Tristan da Cunha, 1937–1938 Get access Lance van Sittert Lance van Sittert Address correspondence to Lance van Sittert, Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Email: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 49, Issue 1, Fall 2015, P…
The fire and the eye: Fishers knowledge, echo-sounding and the invention of the skipper in the St. Helena Bay pelagic fishery ca. 1930–1960
Gabrielle Hecht. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade
Journal Article Gabrielle Hecht. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Get access Gabrielle Hecht. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2012. Pp. xx, 451. $29.95. Lance van Sittert Lance van Sittert University of Cape Town Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1481–1483, https://…
The intimate politics of the Cape Floral Kingdom
The Ornithorhynchus of the Western World’: Environmental Determinism in Eric Anderson Walker's South African History, 1911–1936
The article traces the changing role of environmental determinism in the invention of ‘South African’ history after 1910 through a close reading of the social biography and scholarship of Eric Anderson Walker, professor of history at the South African College (now the University of Cape Town), 1911–36. The dominant liberal historiography still acknowledges Walker as one of the founders of the national academic discipline in English, but otherwise…
Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa
Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa
This suite of essays is a first for historical writing about southern Africa: they recover an animal's ubiquitous, yet hidden presence in human history. The authors have used the dog as a way "to think about human society". The dog is the connecting thread binding these essays, which each reveals a different part of the complex social history of southern Africa. The essays range widely from concerns over disease, bestiality, and social degradatio…
The chimera of redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa: Black Economic Empowerment’ (BEE) in industrial fisheries
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is an attempt to marry redistributive and neo-liberal economic policies. The South African state, however, has differing degrees of power to force redistribution on different sectors of the economy. Fisheries is one of the sectors where state allocation of licenses, exploitation rights and quotas makes the prospects for BEE promising. In this article, we examine redistributive processes in the hake trawl industry.…
Black Economic Empowerment', Business and the State in South Africa
Black Economic Empowerment' (BEE) has been a major policy thrust of the democratic governments in South Africa since 1994 in attempting to redress the effects of apartheid. In this article, we explore the historical precedents to BEE in South Africa, review the different steps taken in promoting it, and assess some of its outcomes to date. We argue that BEE can take only limited forms because of the economic policy constraints in which it has bee…
What’s Next for Environmental History
Bringing in the Wild: The Commodification of Wild Animals in the Cape Colony/Province C . 1850–1950
The history of the imperial/colonial elite's preoccupation with saving a handful of specific ‘game’ species in reserves has come to stand for the relationship of all classes with all wild animals in both South Africa and the wider world of the British empire. The result is a narrative of process and periodization flawed in general and false in the specific case of the Cape Colony/Province, where economics rather than ideology was both the primary…
Reports on Colloquium Sessions
Since the late 1980s the environmental trope in South African history has been gradually elevated to a field of enquiry in its own right. The impetus to this transformation has been varied, the blossoming of environmental history in the North American academy and green politics and agrarian social history in South Africa being among the more influential
The Supernatural State: Water Divining and the Cape Underground Water Rush, 1891-1910
The revisionist scholarship on colonial science assumes its inherent rationality. The example of water divining in southern Africa, however, suggests that the irrational was as much a feature of western as indigenous knowledge systems. The state-led opening of an underground water frontier in the arid (Karoo) interior of the Cape Colony in the two decades after 1890 brought this issue into sharp focus. State water boring was guided by a combinati…
The tyranny of the past: Why local histories matter in the South African fisheries
Class and Canicide in Little Bess: The 1893 Port Elizabeth Rabies Epidemic
Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of South Africa
Making the Cape Floral Kingdom: The discovery and defence of indigenous flora at the Cape ca. 1890-1939
The colonial elite in the south-western Cape were historically aficionados of exotic flora and disdainful of the region's indigenous vegetation. This changed rapidly in the half century after ca. 1890 with the indigenization of botanical science and the emergence of a distinctive Cape botany, practised and patronized by the Cape Town patriciate. The botanists' re-imagining of the indigenous flora as the 'Cape Floral Kingdom', an ancient and endan…
Our irrepressible fellow-colonist’: The biological invasion of prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica) in the Eastern Cape c.1890–c.1910
Bringing in the Wild: The Commodification of Wild Animals in the Cape Colony/Province C . 1850–1950
The history of the imperial/colonial elite's preoccupation with saving a handful of specific ‘game’ species in reserves has come to stand for the relationship of all classes with all wild animals in both South Africa and the wider world of the British empire. The result is a narrative of process and periodization flawed in general and false in the specific case of the Cape Colony/Province, where economics rather than ideology was both the primary…
Holding the Line: The Rural Enclosure Movement in the Cape Colony, C . 1865–1910
The paper outlines the impetus to, trajectory and impact of enclosure in the Cape Colony between the passing of the Fencing Act in 1883 and 1910. By increasing landowners' control over their environment, fencing enabled a suite of remedial measures that raised the productivity of the commercial small-stock sector. Fences also came to stand in the stead of the landowner in defending farms against human or animal trespass. The compartmentalization …
Black Economic Empowerment', Business and the State in South Africa
Black Economic Empowerment' (BEE) has been a major policy thrust of the democratic governments in South Africa since 1994 in attempting to redress the effects of apartheid. In this article, we explore the historical precedents to BEE in South Africa, review the different steps taken in promoting it, and assess some of its outcomes to date. We argue that BEE can take only limited forms because of the economic policy constraints in which it has bee…
Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa
This suite of essays is a first for historical writing about southern Africa: they recover an animal's ubiquitous, yet hidden presence in human history. The authors have used the dog as a way "to think about human society". The dog is the connecting thread binding these essays, which each reveals a different part of the complex social history of southern Africa. The essays range widely from concerns over disease, bestiality, and social degradatio…
Our irrepressible fellow-colonist’: The biological invasion of prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica) in the Eastern Cape c.1890–c.1910
Making the Cape Floral Kingdom: The discovery and defence of indigenous flora at the Cape ca. 1890-1939
The colonial elite in the south-western Cape were historically aficionados of exotic flora and disdainful of the region's indigenous vegetation. This changed rapidly in the half century after ca. 1890 with the indigenization of botanical science and the emergence of a distinctive Cape botany, practised and patronized by the Cape Town patriciate. The botanists' re-imagining of the indigenous flora as the 'Cape Floral Kingdom', an ancient and endan…
Keeping the Enemy at Bay”: The Extermination of Wild Carnivora in the Cape Colony, 1889–1910
The chimera of redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa: Black Economic Empowerment’ (BEE) in industrial fisheries
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is an attempt to marry redistributive and neo-liberal economic policies. The South African state, however, has differing degrees of power to force redistribution on different sectors of the economy. Fisheries is one of the sectors where state allocation of licenses, exploitation rights and quotas makes the prospects for BEE promising. In this article, we examine redistributive processes in the hake trawl industry.…
The Seed Blows About in Every Breeze: Noxious Weed Eradication in the Cape Colony, 1860-1909
Crosby has portrayed the plants and 'weeds' that accompanied European colonial expansion as often beneficial to settlement. In fact, many settlers throughout the temperate zones expended vast amounts of capital and labour on the eradication of those imported plants designated as 'noxious weeds', which they deemed a direct threat to the development of the new colonies. This paper explains the spread of key weed species in the nineteenth century Ca…
Routinising genocide: The politics and practice of vermin extermination in the Cape Province c.1889–1994
Adhikari has recently argued that genocide was a practice particular to colonial frontiers where commercial stock farmers encountered indigenous hunter-gatherers. This paper supports and extends Adhikari’s analysis by broadening its anthropocentric focus to include other species. It shows that the key technologies of genocide employed in the extermination of San hunter-gatherers were subsequently incorporated into everyday Cape stock farming prac…
The Supernatural State: Water Divining and the Cape Underground Water Rush, 1891-1910
The revisionist scholarship on colonial science assumes its inherent rationality. The example of water divining in southern Africa, however, suggests that the irrational was as much a feature of western as indigenous knowledge systems. The state-led opening of an underground water frontier in the arid (Karoo) interior of the Cape Colony in the two decades after 1890 brought this issue into sharp focus. State water boring was guided by a combinati…
Velddrift’: The making of a South African company town
Recent reviews of South African urban history have highlighted its neglect of rural urbanization and the role of the state and capital in urban development. Natural resource frontiers offer a uniquely unobstructed view of rural urbanization under the aegis of capital and the state. The process has been well documented for South Africa's mineral revolution, but other resource frontiers have been completely ignored. The latter developed in the long…
Ironman’: Joseph Daniels and the white history of South Africa's deep south
Polar history has historically been white history, nowhere more so than in South Africa, The recent attempt to imagine a post-apartheid deep south through the public recovery of a black boatman who drowned in the annexation of the Prince Edward Islands in 1948 has ironically left the white history largely intact. Re-reading the annexation not as ceremony and survey, but as labour calls the central claims of this white history into question; that …
Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of South Africa
South Africa's Sea-going Proletariat: The Trawler and Line Fishermen's Union, 1939–1945
Begging Letters: Tin Trunk Literacy and the Empathy Economy of Tristan da Cunha, c . 1909–39
European colonialism fostered ‘radically constrained’ literacies in the global south dominated by the epistolary form produced by ‘tin trunk literati’ frequently scribing as amanuenses for collectives. Literacy on the British mid-South Atlantic island colony of Tristan da Cunha was marginal to the nineteenth century male exchange economy and consequently relegated to the female domestic sphere. With the shift from sail to steam in trans-oceanic s…
The Ornithorhynchus of the Western World’: Environmental Determinism in Eric Anderson Walker's South African History, 1911–1936
The article traces the changing role of environmental determinism in the invention of ‘South African’ history after 1910 through a close reading of the social biography and scholarship of Eric Anderson Walker, professor of history at the South African College (now the University of Cape Town), 1911–36. The dominant liberal historiography still acknowledges Walker as one of the founders of the national academic discipline in English, but otherwise…
Class and Canicide in Little Bess: The 1893 Port Elizabeth Rabies Epidemic
To live this poor life: Remembering the Hottentots Huisie squatter fishery, Cape Town, c.1934-c.1965
The paper provides a social history of a Cape Town squatter fishing settlement, Hottentots Huisie, drawn primarily from the oral histories of its inhabitants before their forced removal under apartheid Group Areas legislation in the mid 1960s. Such use of oral history has fallen into disfavour with South African social historians, increasingly suspicious of the 1980s orthodoxy that all underclass biography is reducible to the essences of 'communi…
Making like America: The industrialisation of the St Helena Bay Fisheries c. 1936‐c. 1956
This paper offers a critique of structuralist theories of the salience of ‘external determinants’ in South Africa's post‐1945 industrialisation by way of a case study of the St Helena Bay fisheries, which underwent rapid industrialisation and subsequent deindustrialisation during and after the Second World War. This process was characterised by the state‐engineered articulation of secondary factory production with a primary fishing sector dominat…
South Africa's Sea-going Proletariat: The Trawler and Line Fishermen's Union, 1939–1945
The handmaiden of industry’: Marine science and fisheries development in South Africa 1895–1939
Keeping the Enemy at Bay”: The Extermination of Wild Carnivora in the Cape Colony, 1889–1910
The Seed Blows About in Every Breeze: Noxious Weed Eradication in the Cape Colony, 1860-1909
Crosby has portrayed the plants and 'weeds' that accompanied European colonial expansion as often beneficial to settlement. In fact, many settlers throughout the temperate zones expended vast amounts of capital and labour on the eradication of those imported plants designated as 'noxious weeds', which they deemed a direct threat to the development of the new colonies. This paper explains the spread of key weed species in the nineteenth century Ca…
'To live this poor life': Remembering the Hottentots Huisie squatter fishery, Cape Town, c.1934-c.1965
The paper provides a social history of a Cape Town squatter fishing settlement, Hottentots Huisie, drawn primarily from the oral histories of its inhabitants before their forced removal under apartheid Group Areas legislation in the mid 1960s. Such use of oral history has fallen into disfavour with South African social historians, increasingly suspicious of the 1980s orthodoxy that all underclass biography is reducible to the essences of 'communi…
Velddrift’: The making of a South African company town
Recent reviews of South African urban history have highlighted its neglect of rural urbanization and the role of the state and capital in urban development. Natural resource frontiers offer a uniquely unobstructed view of rural urbanization under the aegis of capital and the state. The process has been well documented for South Africa's mineral revolution, but other resource frontiers have been completely ignored. The latter developed in the long…
To live this poor life: Remembering the Hottentots Huisie squatter fishery, Cape Town, c.1934-c.1965
The paper provides a social history of a Cape Town squatter fishing settlement, Hottentots Huisie, drawn primarily from the oral histories of its inhabitants before their forced removal under apartheid Group Areas legislation in the mid 1960s. Such use of oral history has fallen into disfavour with South African social historians, increasingly suspicious of the 1980s orthodoxy that all underclass biography is reducible to the essences of 'communi…
Our irrepressible fellow-colonist’: The biological invasion of prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica) in the Eastern Cape c.1890–c.1910
Holding the Line: The Rural Enclosure Movement in the Cape Colony, C . 1865–1910
The paper outlines the impetus to, trajectory and impact of enclosure in the Cape Colony between the passing of the Fencing Act in 1883 and 1910. By increasing landowners' control over their environment, fencing enabled a suite of remedial measures that raised the productivity of the commercial small-stock sector. Fences also came to stand in the stead of the landowner in defending farms against human or animal trespass. The compartmentalization …
The tyranny of the past: Why local histories matter in the South African fisheries
Class and Canicide in Little Bess: The 1893 Port Elizabeth Rabies Epidemic
Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of South Africa
Making the Cape Floral Kingdom: The discovery and defence of indigenous flora at the Cape ca. 1890-1939
The colonial elite in the south-western Cape were historically aficionados of exotic flora and disdainful of the region's indigenous vegetation. This changed rapidly in the half century after ca. 1890 with the indigenization of botanical science and the emergence of a distinctive Cape botany, practised and patronized by the Cape Town patriciate. The botanists' re-imagining of the indigenous flora as the 'Cape Floral Kingdom', an ancient and endan…
Reports on Colloquium Sessions
Since the late 1980s the environmental trope in South African history has been gradually elevated to a field of enquiry in its own right. The impetus to this transformation has been varied, the blossoming of environmental history in the North American academy and green politics and agrarian social history in South Africa being among the more influential
The Supernatural State: Water Divining and the Cape Underground Water Rush, 1891-1910
The revisionist scholarship on colonial science assumes its inherent rationality. The example of water divining in southern Africa, however, suggests that the irrational was as much a feature of western as indigenous knowledge systems. The state-led opening of an underground water frontier in the arid (Karoo) interior of the Cape Colony in the two decades after 1890 brought this issue into sharp focus. State water boring was guided by a combinati…
What’s Next for Environmental History
Bringing in the Wild: The Commodification of Wild Animals in the Cape Colony/Province C . 1850–1950
The history of the imperial/colonial elite's preoccupation with saving a handful of specific ‘game’ species in reserves has come to stand for the relationship of all classes with all wild animals in both South Africa and the wider world of the British empire. The result is a narrative of process and periodization flawed in general and false in the specific case of the Cape Colony/Province, where economics rather than ideology was both the primary…
Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa
Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa
This suite of essays is a first for historical writing about southern Africa: they recover an animal's ubiquitous, yet hidden presence in human history. The authors have used the dog as a way "to think about human society". The dog is the connecting thread binding these essays, which each reveals a different part of the complex social history of southern Africa. The essays range widely from concerns over disease, bestiality, and social degradatio…
The chimera of redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa: Black Economic Empowerment’ (BEE) in industrial fisheries
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is an attempt to marry redistributive and neo-liberal economic policies. The South African state, however, has differing degrees of power to force redistribution on different sectors of the economy. Fisheries is one of the sectors where state allocation of licenses, exploitation rights and quotas makes the prospects for BEE promising. In this article, we examine redistributive processes in the hake trawl industry.…
Black Economic Empowerment', Business and the State in South Africa
Black Economic Empowerment' (BEE) has been a major policy thrust of the democratic governments in South Africa since 1994 in attempting to redress the effects of apartheid. In this article, we explore the historical precedents to BEE in South Africa, review the different steps taken in promoting it, and assess some of its outcomes to date. We argue that BEE can take only limited forms because of the economic policy constraints in which it has bee…
The Ornithorhynchus of the Western World’: Environmental Determinism in Eric Anderson Walker's South African History, 1911–1936
The article traces the changing role of environmental determinism in the invention of ‘South African’ history after 1910 through a close reading of the social biography and scholarship of Eric Anderson Walker, professor of history at the South African College (now the University of Cape Town), 1911–36. The dominant liberal historiography still acknowledges Walker as one of the founders of the national academic discipline in English, but otherwise…
The intimate politics of the Cape Floral Kingdom
Gabrielle Hecht. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade
Journal Article Gabrielle Hecht. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Get access Gabrielle Hecht. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2012. Pp. xx, 451. $29.95. Lance van Sittert Lance van Sittert University of Cape Town Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1481–1483, https://…
Political science (23 works) · South African History and Culture (19 works) · History (17 works) · Law (17 works) · African history and culture studies (15 works) · Archaeology (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Politics (12 works)